"On the mound tonight for the Los Angeles Dodgers ... number 32 ... the great left-hander... Sandy Koufax".
These were the energizing words coming over the airwaves that I lived for as a teenager in the mid-60s. I was a Dodger fan. More specifically, a Sandy Koufax fan. I never saw him pitch, but rather relied on the Voice of the Dodgers, Vin Scully, to paint in my mind's eye the picture of my hero at work. So, on September 9, 1965, it was after "lights out" at a private boarding school north of Los Angeles, and I was under the covers with my transistor radio surreptitiously glued to the final inning of Sandy's perfect game against the Chicago Cubs.
Consciously or not, former sportswriter Jane Leavy has constructed SANDY KOUFAX: A LEFTY'S LEGACY much the same as Ed Gruver's year 2000 book,
Koufax. In each, the author alternates multiple chapters about Sandy's upbringing, professional career, and post-retirement with chapters that are a batter by batter account of Sandy's greatest diamond triumphs - at one inning per chapter. In Gruver's story, it was the last game of the 1965 World Series against the Minnesota Twins when Koufax pitched with only two days rest, and clinched the Fall Classic with grit and a fastball. In Leavy's, it's the Perfect Game pitched against the Cubs at Dodger Stadium, when Sandy's performance touched the truly sublime.
Based on a wealth of interviews with her subject's friends and former fellow players, Leavy's book provides much more information about Sandy's life and meteoric career than does Gruver's. His Jewishness, the affinity he had with Black players because of it, the racism other players felt towards him during his early years with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and his decision not to pitch the opening game of the '65 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur. His perception of the pure science of pitching, and how he got the rules of physics to work to his advantage. The hard feelings Koufax still harbors against Walter Alston for mismanaging his early career. The disaster that was baseball's system of signing "bonus babies". The assault Koufax and Don Drysdale made on the Reserve Clause of the Uniform Players Contract with their famous salary hold-out before the 1966 season. Indeed, while Leavy's chapters on the Perfect Game are models of coherence, sometimes she gets into trouble in the intervening segments with non-sequiturs that left me thinking, "Uh, come again", and which imparted a certain choppiness to the narrative, as if she had failed to stitch all her information together properly. Examples:
"Koufax, a bachelor, was Doggett's guest on the postgame show every time he pitched and a collector of countless new electrical appliances." OK. So?
On Tommy Lasorda's recollections of his relationship with Koufax: "Once he got going on the subject, Lasorda didn't stop, failing to notice that one of the people to whom he was speaking had doubled over in acute pain with stomach cramps." Who was that and why is it relevant? The author doesn't say.
"The day pitchers and catchers reported (to spring training) was still an occasion observed by tomboys who wore their Mary Janes to school in celebration." Huh? Must be an inside joke.
Beyond these infrequent stumbles, Leavy has crafted a book that will surely delight and absorb anyone wishing to revel in the career of Dandy Sandy. A very nice touch in the chapter about the Perfect Game's 9th inning is a verbatim transcription of Vin Scully's radio play-by-play of the action. I can hear it as if it was only yesterday.
It should be noted that if one is looking for dirt, there isn't any outside of a passing observation indicating Koufax is capable of telling off-color jokes, and evidence that Sandy would occasionally sneak into the players' dorm after curfew during spring training. The adulation is slavish. Perhaps purists will say that this prevents SANDY KOUFAX from being a balanced and great book. On the other hand, in this era of tell-all journalism, maybe it's better not to know the blemishes. Why sully the rare heroes left to us? As Cubs great Ernie Banks thought while watching number 32 walk out to the mound: "It's like being in the ballpark with Jesus."
Yeah, but JC didn't have a 100 mph fastball and a curve that dropped as if off the edge of a table.
